Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday June 02, 2012 @12:32PM
from the binary-code-of-ells-and-zeroes dept.

judgecorp writes "Google has applied for the .lol domain in ICANN's sale of generic top level domains (gTLDs). Google also asked for .google, .docs, and .youtube at a cost of $185,000 each, in the round of applications which has finally closed. A glitch in the application system may have leaked some of the applicants' data to other applicants."

I'm one of those people who is sorry to see the erosion of the TLD. It's bad enough that individuals are shut out of the process by the rules and absurd fees. But under the new rules Google has zero right to it. I hope they don't get it.

Agreed the rules/absurd fees associated with these are meant to force the smaller crowd out. the company i work for is small, but we are among the top in our field and i could see a TLD for several processes and standards that we have created and consult on over the years, but at 200k a pop we can't justify even one.

Honestly, the TLD system has been broken for a long time. There should probably never have been TLDs without country codes, for one thing. And enforcement on TLDs that were supposed to be reserved for specific purposes was always lousy -- I remember seeing clearly commercial sites with.net TLDs popping up in the mid-90's.

Yeah, some organization has my lastname.name domain, and I thought it would be a slam dunk to challenge it. Fax them a copy of my driver's license where it shows that my name is lastname, and that the org is an organization and not an individual, and done. But no. I'd have to come up with multiple thousands of dollars to pay off some arbitrator.

I'm still wondering where this money is even going. When you consider all the corporations that will have to buy one of these, and all the similar and related TLDs to their name and proudcts this is going to net ICANN literally many billions of dollars in profit yet ICANN is meant to be non-profit. Where is that money going? Is each member of staff at ICANN just going to get billion dollar paychecks or what?

I'm pretty sure this is like when Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel's patents [engadget.com]. It looks to me like agree with you that the TLD namespace is being polluted. If they get.lol, it'll prove the system is stupid, if not outright broken.

Maybe I'm uninformed on the matter, but if you ask me, they should drop top level domains altogether. Everyone has a.com. Few other things really "exist":.org + some popular at the moment (cc, ca, what have you). Imagine perhaps a blank global TLD, and make the trailing dot optional. Then make a distributed, global DNS system. Sit and wait till those with extensions fade to obscurity ("translating" them to new TLDs would also be an option). Let the bidding begin. Then after the dust from the auctions sets

No, x in that f(x) is not a number of globally registered domains, it is the number of domains owned by an individual/company. That is, for every subject, registration of the first domain is cheap. The more *they* buy, the more they pay for the next one. Thus, moderation is advised (and cybersquatting eliminated). Again, just an idea, I don't claim it's bulletproof. For example there may be places on earth where starting a "company" is extremely easy. Also, abuses such as having employees register domains

Firstly, I made the distinction between NFP and FP corporations. Secondly, I never said "suddenly". Admittedly, I should've made my point clearer and stated "another" sign that the system is open to abuse.

They don't own it; they don't even "own" it. Edit/etc/hosts and point "google.docs" whithersoever you wish. ICANN just own a list to which people subscribe. If you don't like their list, don't subscribe to it. They control nothing of importance in that capacity except what you let them control.

If lol was used historically on usenet [wikipedia.org], and Google owns Usenet [google.com], then couldn't Google claim ownership of it? Interestingly, AOL tried to trademarke LOL [uspto.gov] in 2003 but never filed a use statement...

If lol was used historically on usenet [wikipedia.org], and Google owns Usenet [google.com], then couldn't Google claim ownership of it? Interestingly, AOL tried to trademarke LOL [uspto.gov] in 2003 but never filed a use statement...

Google doesn't own Usenet, they bought Deja News (a Usenet provider). No one can own Usenet, any more than one can own the Internet. It's a decentralized service, and functions almost exactly like the Internet in general, with peers sharing posts between eachother... That's why I can subscribe to a giganews account and my posts still show up in Google's usenet service.

This just goes to show how flawed this system is. When a for profit corporation can "own" a non-trademark general use term as a TLD, it's a clear sign that the system is open to abuse.

Money and lawyers are the traditional tools for dealing with contention. Would it be better if we pushed all DNS disputes through the (US?) trademark system? It would be great if there were a technical solution but that doesn't seem to exist. If we use IP addresses without DNS names it would only make memorable/easy IP ranges the issue of contention (and 42.42.42.42 is already taken.) So, just like email addresses, the naming scheme won't change until we completely replace the system with something new -- and maybe not even then.

A tangent: a co-op style domain system would be interesting. Buy a TLD like "*.commons" to run it. Let anyone in and have a member voting system to resolve disputes (think ugly-but-functional Wikipedia politics). Give the names away free, with the use of a TLD wide SSL cert, or setup self-signing for name holders. A network effect could make it viable, and donations could pay for root servers.

Yeah, but to make namecoin work... you need a co-op run.bit TLD (or someone with fat stacks of cash running it as a benevolent dictator, or whatever); else people have to run fragmented DNSes using a non-official TLD (and hoping nobody buys that TLD from ICANN, or mass confusion), or apply some longer suffix (such as namecoin-suffix.dot-bit.org)

Although some of our engineers may have posted content to it during their 20 percent time. And we don't keep records on everyone who has contributed anonymously to the section on "Larry's Management Style."

BTW the domain is for sale! We'd be happy to sell it to you. The price is 1 billion USD.

Yep. The root servers point the zone to whichever nameservers are authoritative for that ccTLD, and those nameservers are free to serve up whatever they like, including A records for the uz domain itself.

However, since it is generally expected that nobody does this, you can't expect all clients to do what you want them to. For example, when you type "uz" into Safari's address bar, it doesn't recognize this pattern as an FQDN so it tries a couple of other behaviors - first appending your search domain, the

But search.google, mail.google, news.google and code.google isn't redundant. It's maybe *pointless* when users are used to mail.google.com and news.google.com, especially when they still haven't gotten rid of the redundant `www.` from their main URL

I wonder at what point gTLDs are going to make it harder to recognize a URL when it comes up in text. Right now, I expect it's not too hard to write code that identifies a URL as a URL and sets up a link. But when my website name can be AUTOEXEC.BAT, things might get a bit different.

If Google chooses to give a heavy weighting towards sites that use gTLDs, then the sites will become immensely valuable. OTOH, if Google decide that gTLDs are essentially ICANN spam, they will be dead in the water.

Given that Google has only applied for four, when they could have budgeted for hundreds or even thousands, my guess is that.com will continue to be the top dog for the foreseeable future.

Shouldn't they also ask for.ioi,.101 and.l0l?:)While having a whole TLD dedicated to trolling Google seems unlikely, I can see someone getting.ioi for "legitimate" reasons and then offering.lol domain owners to buy the same ones, or suffer from links to ".IOI":\